What is Hyperreality?

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Before we can undestand hyperreality, I believe we must first recognize how Baudrillard got to his ideas. The following was taken from an interview:

“It is true that our culture—modern, technical—tries to split the positive moment from the negative moment and to conserve only the positive, and so one ends up in a kind of ultrareal reality, a hyperreality which has no end”

— "Endangered Species" - 126

In response to symbolic exchange, Baudrillard discusses how death and disappearance is the counterpart to living and appearance. Therefore, he notes how it is essential for something “must take death to it”—to a point where nothing remains. Only then, can it can effectively be renewed into something different.

A problem occurs when there is no longer a reversibility possibility. In modernity, the capitalist regime causes there to no longer be a situation of disappearance because we’re always producing (we are always accumulating). Therefore, instead of being two concepts that are symbiotic, life and death becomes opposites to one another. Therefore, Capitalism will only define whether a machine functions or it does not, it does not make death ever-present. This form of capitalism is also coined by Freud as the “death drive”.

This idea of no longer having death births the concept of hyperreality, because now we are only focusing on the positives (life). By avoiding such negativities, we create a world that is fake—a hyperreality.